


The Theater of Dr. Zhuang

by twofoldAxiom



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe Per Chapter, Chapter Tags, Dream Sex, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Drugs, M/M, Minor Roxy's Mom | Alpha Rose Lalonde/Dirk's Bro | Alpha Dave Strider, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pretentious References, Recreational Drug Use, inception references
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:41:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22991155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofoldAxiom/pseuds/twofoldAxiom
Summary: Rose Lalonde told you about Dr. Zhuang's Dream Resort during one of your lavish house parties, and you were pretty sure it was a bid to get in your head, or otherwise some kind of scam, until she told you she had a vision and you have to go through with this to save the world.Times like this you kind of wish she was wrong, because you're pretty sure it's not as easy as taking a vacation in your own subconscious.Sweet dreams.
Relationships: Dirk's Bro | Alpha Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Kudos: 10





	The Theater of Dr. Zhuang

**Author's Note:**

> There's a pretty big twist involved that I chose not to warn for, but I'll try to tag whatever goes on in each chapter because every chapter from hereout, if set in a dream, will be a different AU. Otherwise, consider this a sort of "dumping ground" for AUs that I otherwise don't feel like devoting too much time to.
> 
> Loosely inspired by 31 Flavors of Green by callmearcturus and mimsical, not cited as an inspiration because idk if they'd be alright with that. Credit where credit is due, though, so I put the mention here.
> 
> This chapter is just setup, but there's still necessary warnings for mentions of MDMA usage, party drugs, and alcohol. Please mention if I miss anything! I'm not very good at catching tags myself.
> 
> Story title inspired by "The Circus of Dr. Lao" and "Zhuang Zhou Dreams of Being a Butterfly" ("But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.")

"You really think this is a good idea." You say, flatter than the Sprite and AJ you've been sipping for the past hour, as esteemed literary genius Rose Lalonde hands you a flier for one Dr. Zhuang's Dream Resort. Some part of you wants to laugh, and you would if you were anyone but Dave Strider. "Here I thought I was the one in charge of shitty jokes and shittier product. This looks like a bad attempt at a Vaudeville show recreation, and you just made me say the word Vaudeville, eugh."

"Truly astounding that you bothered to remember what Vaudeville was, but as much as I'm touched at the gesture, no, this isn't a joke. You're going to run yourself into the ground the way you're doing things now, and I know your fascination with early twenty-tens suicidal burnout meme culture is a part of your whole..." She gestures at your everything with one hand, making a noise in the back of her throat. " _Persona_ , let's say. But it's even _less_ funny if you actually die in a coke-fueled party accident."

"Didn't know you cared so much about me, I'll send you a gift basket and a heartfelt letter." 

She frowns, and you think to yourself that maybe you've been hanging out with her too much; she's been rubbing off on you and it makes you sound like her mother or something, probably. Rose really does deserve a gift basket full of old books and expensive candy, but you can't even say that sincerely anymore. 

It's three in the morning and the party's wound down to just a few stragglers and the two of you sitting on an overly plush, hideously bright red couch that somehow manages to be lumpy and too soft all at once, just the way you like it. You sip a sugary monstrosity of Fuji apple mush and what must have once been Sprite, less for the taste and more so your body doesn't collapse under the strain of MDMA-induced dehydration, and she sips straight vodka like a monster because she kind of is one, but you've both long given up on criticizing each other's vices.

So you thought, anyway. Why is she heckling you about your sleep schedule now? Or maybe she's offering you an alternative to molly, but she'll have to pry your party drugs from your cold, dead hands.

You hold up the pamphlet to the light again. Curlicue script and smiling faces, dragons and magicians and even what looks like a flying whale. "What does this 'Dream Resort' do exactly? They gonna put on costumes and play out my erotic fantasies of a Barack Obama slash S-B-and-H-J threesome? At least that's what the pamphlet makes it sound like."

"I wouldn't want to inflict that on any living being, so no, I wouldn't have suggested that had it been the case." She takes another sip, and you can feel your whole nasal passage wrinkling up just from the smell. It's weird that when she started she was a giggly drunk; now she's just Sober Rose with marginally less edge, and you're not sure if you like that better than Giggly Rose at all. "At any rate, it's a good opportunity to scope out the competition."

Ah, "opportunity", now you get it. _It has to do with our fate, it has to do with Betty Crocker, it has to do with the end of the world._

When doesn't it, lately?

"You think this... Dr. Zhuang, might compete with me?" _You think this is another one of Betty's setups?_ You say it as casually as you can manage, but behind your shades you're glancing around the room, at passed out revellers who might not be as unconscious as they look. "I don't remember getting into the kitschy Vaudeville show business. I'm in show business, yeah, but not that kind of show business."

"I didn't make that mistake, I wouldn't want to insult Vaudeville that way." She smiles at you, warmly, but the same way alcohol poisoning is warm. "I had a lovely experience while I was there, is all, but I had one of my episodes not long after. In your bathtub upstairs, in fact."

You snort. "For _shame_ , Lalonde. At least have them in the jacuzzi where everyone can see."

"In _Versace?_ I don't think so. My gothic writerly mystique would never recover." She tips back the last of her drink, and you watch her throat bob with it before she tosses the glass over her shoulder. It rolls across the carpet and stops against a life size statue of Geromy. "At any rate, I highly recommend the experience, if only to know what haunts your subconscious. And I'd love to know what sort of things you come up with once you get there."

You probably shouldn't have alcohol so soon after coming down from a high, but you're starting to itch for it. "Sounds cryptic. You gunning to steal my ideas, too?"

"Oh yes. All great art is theft." She drinks more Smirnoff straight from the bottle, pauses, and pours some in your glass. "Just be sure to come back with something worth stealing."

~!~

You're standing outside the vaunted "dream resort", which doesn't look like it's going to have the space for anything but maybe a laundromat, if that.

Rose explained to you, a couple days after the party, sober, and miserable about the fact. Lucid-dreaming technology, lets you live out your wildest fantasies, blah blah blah you lie in what looks and feels suspiciously like a coffin with what amounts to a high-tech tiara on your head. You're put to sleep and spend an hour or two living out a few days in a world that doesn't exist, where anything you want can happen or your money back. 

Everyone who's ever gone in has vouched for it, including Rose herself, until she had that seizure in your bathtub and saw a thousand futures unspooling before her from that point onwards.

Only one of them had that golden thread that she knows will save humanity, in some way or another, and it involved you checking this place out. You're a little bitter about not being saved yourself, but you have to admit, if expensive vacations are what it takes to save the species then maybe you don't have to be so mad about it.

You take a hot shower, put on some clean pajamas (your favorite ones, soft and warm like a bunny's ass), and look at the tiara in your hands where you stand in front of the "sleeping pod". Dr. Zhuang's made all of it a sleek plastic affair with a couple blinking lights and a silicone interior, satin white finish and otherwise featureless. You're vaguely reminded of some bougie sex toy thing you bought for Rose once as a gag gift, and she proceeded to give you suggestions for what to get her next time because she can't let a joke just be a joke.

She's probably learned from then, because even with the gravity of the situation, of her visions, this feels like an elaborate setup just to get you to take a nap, albeit, a nap going for a couple hundred grand. The room is comfortably cool, the door is locked, and the wall-sized glass window gives you a great view of the Hollywood sign that you won't be needing because you're spending your one hour in here unconscious.

You crawl into the pod, the silicone squishing under you with the disconcerting impression of crawling across cool, fatty flesh. You make a mental note to describe it to Rose as like sleeping on a giant boob later, and then you put on the tiara.

No sudden blackouts. No sting of needles, no electric shocks, no sudden drug-induced drowsiness. You're almost disappointed; you're just wearing stupid headgear and sitting on a weird bed made by people who don't understand that swanky hotel beds are meant to be a comforting experience. You lie down with a sigh, pull up the blankets- that at least they got right, it's cotton instead of a weird rubber sheet- and watch the room's diffused lighting dim in response to you tucking yourself in.

There's a soft, distant chime, presumably from some hidden speaker you managed to miss, when the room finally goes dark. The window even blackens, electrical "blinds" sealing you away from the rest of the world. The perky receptionist told you that meant your pod was ready to have you; you just had to fall asleep.

Well, you've put it off long enough, and if this place really does have some kind of tie to Betty Crocker, you're the guy who's going to give her a hard time for it. Time to get Freudian.

You close your eyes.

~!~

It’s nothing but the black of the backs of your eyelids, until it’s not. You get the sensation of drifting on warm air, and slowly, slowly, rising like a bubble. You feel yourself being molded, or maybe just coming back together from nothingness, solid weight coming back to your limbs.

The world resolves into color, shape, sound.

So. This is what the inside of your subconscious looks like when you're not letting it run wild.

~!~

You're still you, all six feet and seven inches, give or take. You're wearing your usual, if anything you wear can be your usual; red felt suit, black shirt, white tie, and hell, you're even wearing your shades, which you _know_ you didn't fall asleep with.

You're in a square, beige room, softly lit from the corners though you can't see any specific sources of lighting. There's a window to your left, blinds drawn, and you're sitting in a couch so real you swear you can smell the leather. The floor looks like polished hardwood and feels like hospital linoleum. The sound of traffic from outside adds to the overall ambiance. 

No clocks, no calendars, one white door. White, paper-cutout letters beside it, taped to the wall, though if you look away from them, they change when you look again. They're the only clue that you're dreaming, really.

 _Is this it?_ You think. 

Thankfully, there's no shitty waiting room music. There's something to be said for small mercies.

When you look again the words on the wall have resolved into instructions.

_PLEASE ANSWER THE FORM_

Alright, that's cool. You swing a leg over the other and look to your right, to the side table populated by a cute little potted succulent and a sheet of paper that definitely wasn't there before. You're physically aware of the pen in your pocket like someone just told you about how you're always tasting your own tongue, the weight of the custom Squiddles fountain pen that Rose got you on _your_ birthday sitting against your chest. Like, really, is that thing really such a fundamental part of you that you dream with it? Or is there something about Dr. Zhuang's that made you call it up because you need it? You don't know how this works.

You look up again, but the instructions haven't changed, so, that's probably important or something. You pick up the form, uncap your pen, and get ready to

Uh. Get ready to what, exactly?

You can't quite read what it says, as if the text is swimming across the paper in lazy, smokey swirls; it's about as legible as a Rorschach test, you get impressions, snatches of phrases almost like you're just remembering them, a letter or a number or a word just out of reach every few seconds, between blinks.

_... Scenario number six-two-nine-six-nine-four..._

( _Surprise me_ )

... _Seven to twelve..._

_... Vulnerable..._

( _What do you want_ )

_... Fourteen to twenty four..._

( _What do you think you want)_

Yeah, that means absolute dick-all to you without further context, and somehow you manage to glean enough information to answer the questions and blanks with ease. It pulls at something in you, making you lay out what you want to see, who you want to meet, how you want to feel; maybe it's because you're asleep, or maybe it's because nobody is actually here to judge what you're writing.

Rose told you that anything could happen, and it'll feel real but you'll be fine no matter what. Evidently, she pushed the limits of that theory again and again while she was here, because if you know Rose she'd have tried to jump out the window just to see if she could, and if she could she'd try to see how far the world outside extended before she could take it apart at the seams. Why not go a little wild?

You're not sure what you wrote, but you wrote it. Something with pirates. Something exciting. Something with a real, actual surprise in it that you wouldn't come up with yourself; what fun is a dream if you don't get some kind of wild curveball thrown at you?

But nothing too vicious, not really. 

You don't know if you're telling the form that, or yourself.

When you're done you put the form back on the side table and look up, squinting at the light even through your shades. Did it get brighter in here? The words on the wall are rearranged again.

_YOU MAY NOW ENTER THE DOOR_

Wow.

You're now fully convinced Dr. Zhuang is, if not the Batterwitch, then something or someone equally sinister. Only true evil could make people dream up boring waiting rooms and unreadable forms without the decency of giving them crushing anxiety at the same time. You didn't even have a doctor looming over you with a comically oversized scalpel.

But what the hell, you've got an hour of real time and who knows how long worth of dream time to kill. If you've only been asleep for a few minutes, and it's probably not even that yet, you can't start acting suspicious _now_.

The knob is smooth and pleasantly warm under your fingers as you turn it and open the door. You're not sure what you were expecting, but a seemingly-endless stairwell definitely wasn't it. More instructions on the wall, the same diffuse lighting in the beige room lighting each step. 

God, you hate stairs. Dr. Zhuang is rapidly getting further up on your shit list, sitting right there between Hoss Andrews from highschool and Kanye West. 

_PLEASE COUNT EACH STEP DOWNWARDS TO BEGIN DREAMING_

_ENJOY YOUR STAY_

You've seen Inception; you can kind of get the logic behind this. You didn't think it had any basis in reality, but what do you know about sleep science?

You close the door behind you, take a deep breath, and look down into the abyss. Your foot settles on the first step with the faint, barely-audible impact of shoes on wood and plastic, and it feels solid enough at least that you don't think you'll be pushed down by any wayward thoughts. Not really. Your money back guarantee if you do, right?

_Alright. One._

You put your foot down on the next one.

_Two._

The light dims, just barely, just at the edges of your vision. You feel the rush of wind, and a sense of deep calm, not unlike the chemical softness of anesthesia. Your back straightens, your focus on the distant line of what could be a horizon at the end of this stairway.

_Three._

_Four._

_Five..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to suggest themes, kinks, or AUs for later chapters!


End file.
